I was thinking about the legacy of ghosts in fiction, and specifically the moral power of those Dickensian ghosts. Because a ghost can be a very powerful but also manipulative element.

What really interests me, on a deeper level, is how our information is coming to us in some kind of messed up way that is making us idiotic. I don't think we've become more idiotic than we always were, but I think the information transfer is funky. The shorthand of it is that social media is making us mentally insane.

If you haven't read you don't have the voice. The lack of voice eliminates experience.

The internet kind of feels like happiness sometimes, however. It feels like stimulation.

I might take from the current political chaos a desire to somehow reflect its essential qualities in a story - the blatant lies that get accepted with repetition; the way mass media seems to be agitating people en masse; the way, particularly, that a relatively lucky and affluent and privileged population can be undone by a certain spoiled quality; that feeling when two decent people violently disagree, because they are arguing from two non-intersecting data sets - well, the list goes on.

Humor is what happens when we're told the truth quicker and more directly than we're used to.

Whenever you talk about writing I think you have to remember that it all has a big question mark over it - every word has a big question mark over it.